Nobel laureates Heinrich Rohrer (left) and Gerd Binnig (right) of IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory, shown here in 1981 with a first-generation scanning tunneling microscope (STM). Rohrer and Binnig were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1986 for inventing the STM. The STM provided scientists around the world with the specialized tools they needed to explore and manipulate materials at the atomic level for the first time, leading to new kinds of devices and structures built from the "bottom" up.
